Asus P6T6 WS Revolution gets detailed

Xfastest has once again delivered a ton of pictures of an upcoming X58 motherboard and this time it's the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution that they've gotten their hands on. We have to admit that we missed the entire fact about this motherboard featuring an NF200 chip.

The P6T6 WS Revolution has no less than six PCIe x16 slots, but all of them won't have the full bandwidth, and despite the addition of the NF200 chip, this board doesn't gain any extra PCIe lanes. The only thing it really gains is a higher price.

As the NF200 chip needs 16 PCIe to talk to the chipset, splitting 16 lanes into two by eight lanes gives you pretty much the same effect. The NF200 will also add some latency, but we've been told from various sources that it's not enough to be noticeable. The 32 lanes coming out of the NF200 can't be spit again as far as we know, so this chip can't do four x8 PCIe slots.

It would be interesting to know how Asus has managed to split the bandwidth between the slots, although looking at the pictures, it seems like you're limited to the three blue slots for SLI. This is suggesting that the top or bottom two slots are feed by the NF200 chip and the third slot by the X58 chipset directly as per Nvidia's recommendations.

We'd also guess that the white slot is coming off the ICH10R and as such has limited bandwidth at four PCIe lanes. The two black slots are most likely shared with the blue slots above them, so when all four are used, you're limited to four x8 PCIe slots. We're not sure if the bottom blue slot can be used at the same time as all the four slots above it.

We'll have to wait for the official word from Asus on how this board works, but we've also heard a rumor that this board might not make it into the retail channel.